One Stray Thought

I have stopped walking, I mean walking for exercise, after I found that my knees are not what they used to be. I started swimming and after two years am realizing that my shoulders are not much better either. I do not know what to take up next.

Meanwhile, my wife, whose hands and legs are intact - she preserved them and only used her tongue for exercise all these years - has started walking after the doctors advised her to rest her tongue and use her extremities for exercise. The slopes of the hillocks near our house are being converted into residential plots and my wife uses the newly laid roads for her walk. (The roads are still there after a year and I recommend the contractor if you have any road work to be done). Some evenings when I am free, I join her and after reaching the spot, sit there on any convenient boulder observing others who come there, till my wife completes her rounds.

I went there this evening and was on my seat observing a boy and girl pair who seemed to be walking on clouds - not on roads and was repenting for never having attempted a walk on the clouds myself, when this young couple with the apple of their eye, the toddler, caught my attention. I can’t guess the child’s age. He must have just started to talk and walk. My children past that age long back and I do not remember at what age children start talking and walking. (My wife remembers these things very well and she guessed the child’s age to be a year and a half).

Anyway, this toddler was happy to tumble along with his unsteady steps, barefoot, and was going on merrily when his mother called out asking him to stop. He stopped and looked at her enquiringly as to what was wrong when she lifted him up and continued to walk carrying him. He started to squirm and tried to wiggle out. He wanted to walk. As soon as she put him down he gave a winner’s smile and started running. She ran behind him caught him and lifted him up once again and the child shouted “no, no, no” and having found no release, started crying his head off. She had no option but to put him down. As he started running once again she turned to her husband and pleaded plaintively “Do something and stop him. His legs are aching”.

The child was happy when he was on his legs. He was crying when lifted to be carried. But the mother was feeling the pain in his legs! It was very amusing.

I remember having read this definition of a sweater somewhere.

Sweater : ‘A garment which children have to wear when their parents feel cold’.

Whoever coined that must have observed a lot of parents.